Emotional intelligence as a predictor of academic achievement of children: the pluricultural context of Ceuta

Abstract

There´s a high concern about the low results in the different academic areas, which promotes the search of new teaching techniques and methods. These sudden changes make our students to be constantly on the look out for new abilities in order to adapt to this ever-changing process. From this point of view we stress the relevance of the whole range of emotions and their appropriate control to achieve higher academic results. The main objective of this paper is to reflect the predictors of Emotional Intelligence (EI) and Academic Achievement (AA) of children from 6 to 12 in the city of Ceuta. To make it possible we focused on 404 participants from 4 different schools that clearly reflect the city’s multicultural features; 47.8% of them are boys and 52.2% girls, 68.8% are Muslims and 31.2% Christians. The techniques used in this survey are a similar adaptation of MSCEIT, Salovey & Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test (Mayer et al., 2009) as well as the children’s grades. The results show medium-high levels on all of the research variables. The predictors of EI are grade and AA. Socioeconomic and cultural and custom/religion work as a predictor, but not in all cases. The predictors of AA are EI, customs/religion and grade. Socioeconomic and cultural variable is a predictor of two factors. We have also found a statistically significant relationship between EI and AA which increases when EI levels are higher.